The maker of the Claude chatbot plans to sell 825 million shares priced between $70 and $78 apiece. At the midpoint of that range, the offering would raise more than $61 billion. The company is expected to begin trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker symbol "ANT" later this month.

Even at that scale, the IPO would fall short of the record $86 billion raised by SpaceX in its June offering. But it would still rank among the biggest ever, and it would put Anthropic ahead of rival OpenAI in reaching public markets, setting up a pair of blockbuster debuts by the two leading AI developers.

"For tech and AI, this is the first time a U.S. frontier lab carries a standalone public market price, uncluttered by an ad business or a rocket business," Dan Ives, a partner and senior managing director at Yorkville Ives & Co., wrote in an analyst note.

The filing comes as Anthropic's revenue is climbing fast. The company brought in more than $16 billion in the first half of the year, 14 times its revenue from the same period a year earlier, according to a regulatory filing last month. Like many tech firms going public, however, Anthropic has yet to turn a profit.

Founded in 2021 by former OpenAI leaders, Anthropic is locked in a fierce competition with its rival, as well as with Google, newer startups in the U.S. and China, and SpaceX's AI division. Those companies have been spending heavily on the computing resources needed to build advanced AI, losing more money than they make and fueling worries that the sector may be overheating.

Those concerns were on display late last week, when a sharp sell-off on Wall Street was led by stocks tied to the buildout of AI data centers. Markets around the world came under pressure as companies that had benefited from the AI boom continued to slide. Shares in AI firms have swung for months on fears that construction of new data centers could slow as borrowing costs rise, and critics have warned that a bubble may be forming.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has himself cautioned that the industry should slow its rapid development to allow safety measures to catch up. In September, he warned that without such a slowdown, AI could be capable of unleashing a swarm of agents that could take over the entire internet within six to 12 months. He outlined a plan on his website to increase industry checks, noting that Anthropic is already implementing some of them on its own, but said other steps would require coordination across the industry and with governments worldwide, including authoritarian ones.

The offering could give Anthropic enormous resources to accelerate its expansion and potentially add billions of dollars to the fortunes of Dario Amodei and his sister and co-founder, Daniela Amodei.

The IPO's pricing will be closely watched. If shares are priced too high, they can skid on the first day of trading; if they are seen as too cheap, the company and its underwriters leave money on the table. For a region whose economy is increasingly tied to the AI industry, the debut will also be a test of whether public investors share the optimism that has driven private valuations of the sector to new heights.